If you put your hard drive where the optical is and a SSD as boot your going to have issues and not only that Apple won't cover your warranty/AppleCare as you made a modification.
If your fine with that ok, jsut let you know you can't use OS X boot disks or Windows on external optical drives.
Carbon copy cloner will clone Lion and Recovery from the HD to the SSD, but you will have to use Winclone to clone Windows/bootcamp to a external drive while this whole mess is going on.
Next, forget about direct installing Linux on a Mac, just forget it, Lion did a number on it and it's done and Apple doesn't want more that Bootcamp + Win 7 on a boot parittion.
Mac's have hardware drivers, needs fan control, video drivers, wifi drivers and all sorts of other stuff that you would have to depend upon the Linux community to produce, if any are using Linux on newer Mac's, older Mac's to 2009 with 10.6 sure. No sweat.
10.7 messed around deep in firmware, all for Lion Internet Recovery and all this buisness that you need certian stufff installed in EFI to get Linux to run on a Mac.
Better you run Linux in a virtual machine software like VMFusion or Parallels Desktop, they will hodl your hand and you you can not only install Linux, but many different distros (versions of it) also Windows XP-7!
You take a bit of a performance hit, no 3D graphics, but for screwing around it's fine. You get into trouble you just tell VMFusion to trash Linux or Windows and your done.
You can even save "snapshots" to revert back too.
You see, Apple only supports Win 7 in Bootcamp, only as a selling point, they don't want to suport anything esle and you need Apple's support because they control the hardware, the drivers and the Hybrid MBR that enables Windows to work on a GUID Mac.
So don't go installing Linux unless you know what the heck your doing and have experience installing Linux on PC's with Windows first, because the Mac is a whole another ball of wax inside.
I really recommned oyu just leave your machine alone, a SSD is not going to make a bit of difference, perhaps a program will launch a few seconds faster, big deal.
SSD speed comes into play on large files transfered to another SSD. That will cut the time in half easy, but small files 99% of people use won't make a difference, it's like going 100 MPH and 1000 MPH in a mere 1ft, they both get there almost instantly
If they were both going 10,000 miles, oh then yes, 1000 MPH is 10x faster than 100MPH.
A fast computer is a desire of many a geek, the fact is a Mac laptop lasts only about 3.5-4 years or so and then it's done for.
There is always another faster comptuer than yours. Always, so why blow your money?, save it for a rainy day. Vacations and travel are the best, computers are lame in comparison.
Good Luck 🙂
